7 Best Winter Escapes

Why let Blighty’s filthy weather bring you down when you can hop on a plane and be hammering sun-drenched trails in a matter of hours?

- Dan Milner

According to Wainwright, “There’s no such thing as bad weather, only unsuitable clothing,” but then the eloquent coast-to-coast walker never tried steering a front wheel along a ribbon of greasy South Downs chalk on a cold, wet February afternoon. Today’s armoury of technical outdoors wear might do a sterling job at keeping the misery of the British winter at bay, but slipping down descents and coating your drive train with grind paste on every ride soon gets tiring. Fortunately we are, for the moment at least, still part of Europe, which means travel to warmer, drier climes is still a budget flight away. The fact that two hours on a plane can surround you with dusty trails winding their way down to a gently lapping, azure blue sea and a cold cerveza, is enough to bring cheer to the heart of even the most severe SAD sufferer.

So switch off the UV lamp, dig out your shorts from the laundry bin and book a flight to one of these world-class winter riding destinations.

1. SIERRA GUADARRAMA, SPAIN

It’s something of a secret that, just an hour outside Spain’s capital of Madrid, there sits an oasis of single track, although that’s about as far as we can stretch the desert references. Actually far from desert-like, the 150km range of hills called the Sierra de Guadarrama is thickly forested, providing hundreds of kilometres of loamy trails to carve along. With such a long range of hills at your disposal, the Guadarrama delivers everything from open rocky mountainside and shrub-lined single track to tight pine tree slalom runs and plunging, rooty descents. The east-to-west orientation of the range means the green, fern-covered, forested north faces contrast with the drier, sun-baked rocky south faces to offer a truly schizophrenic riding location.